New mill guy with a dumb question. I've got a maple that I want to mill. It snapped off about 10 ft up the trunk and has a 3 inch hollow spot in the heart. I'm afraid it's probably thru most of the log since what's on the ground has rot and that's from 10 feet up the whole tree. How do you deal with that? There is lots of wood left in this log. Instead of finding center, should I just mark top and bottom of the suspected rot and go from there or should I start slabbing from the topside? Or I guess I could start bucking until I hit solid wood, but that seems wasteful. What would you do?
I'd make slabs out of it if that's what you were wanting to do. You could quarter saw it and miss most of the rot. A lot more work with a chainsaw mill.
I'd just level the rails to the approximate center of the innermost intact annual ring. There isn't any need to be super-precise about this.
I've sawn a couple like that. The 4' black walnut at my sister's had quite a bit of lightning damage - I think it might have been hit more than once. I've also sawn some maple with a bit of rot that was centered in the log; and that was much easier to deal with than the walnut, which had off-center hollow pockets in several places. If you haven't bucked your logs to length, that can be one way to assess how far the damage goes, and what it's doing in the log. In a large maple, I'll bet it's mostly centered. I just tried to "guesstimate" where I thought it would have been when I was marking the log. These days, I like to make my first cut right through the center, like you saw me do at the GTG. I do this mostly for speed. Once I make that inital cut through the heart center, then I can just set my mill to "slabbing depth" and saw the rest of the log in one long session. I don't think I'd go that way when there's heart rot, as you're likely to hit some dirt in there, and I sure don't want to resharpen after a single cut. So I'd take the extra time to saw it from the outside first. I think it will be worth it though - maple can do some really pretty stuff when it starts to turn, as long as you catch it before it goes punky. Don't be surprised if you end up changing your mind about what you want to do with it!
It's a red - probably my favorite wood to mill. Grew in a pretty swampy spot on the property - dunno if its the soil conditions there, but all the red maple I've hauled out of there has been just stunning. What kind was yours again? Can't wait to see some pics!
I would rip it right down the middle and see how far up the rot goes. You'll probably have to raise your rail on the top (as in the top of the tree) so it is equidistant from the pith on each end of the log. You'll have some waste from that slab but at least you'll know exactly what you're dealing with and can figure out how to get the most out of the tree from there.
